I’ve attended (and sometimes participated in) a number of these events, and have written about them, most recently at Drucker Day 2015. The morning keynote this year was by Renée Mauborgne, a professor at the business school INSEAD, and co-author (with W. Chan Kim), of the major bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy and the just-released Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing – Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth. The afternoon keynote was by Deborah Clark, senior vice president and general manager of the business-focused American Public Media radio program Marketplace.

Here are 7 key takeaways from Drucker Day 2017:
1. Get back to first principles. Drucker taught that you can’t successfully move into the future unless you understand your present reality. A powerful statement came during a surprise element: the unveiling of an eerie and otherworldly, and highly effective “holographic effect” of Drucker speaking about his principles of teaching, consulting and writing about management. The theme was also prevalent in Professor Jean Lipman-Blumen‘s presentation “Leadership For What?”
2. The Drucker spirit is alive and well. This was a pervasive idea all day. In particular Elizabeth Edersheim, author of The Definitive Drucker, gave a great overview of Drucker’s contributions to management, and how his ideas continue to influence everyone from Google and Amazon to lesser-known entities like UltimateGuitar.com. Drucker School professor Bernie Jaworski, who holds the Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts, led a lively panel session on “Examining Drucker’s Principles for Today.” Students get a strong foundation in Drucker studies through his classes “Drucker Practice of Management,” and “Great Books of Drucker.”
3. The future will be interdisciplinary. Professor Hovig Tchalian presented about the Claremont Game Lab, based at the Drucker School but open to students from any of the Claremont Colleges. Creating successful games involves creativity, and multiple skills in business and various technology areas.
4. Creating wins over competing. This was a major theme for Renée Mauborgne; if you create and execute on something really new, different and useful, you create space for yourself that did not exist before and that others can only try to enter. Creativity is a huge part of the Drucker School experience, especially in preparing students for leadership roles in the creative economy. As it points out on its website: “Creative industries range from software design to entertainment, fashion, and the arts, and they are the single largest growth segment in Los Angeles and California.”
5. Observe and perceive what’s really there. (Not what you want to see, or mistakenly see.) This was a theme in Professor Jeremy Hunter’s presentation, “The Zen of Drucker: Mindfulness and the Practice of Self-Management.” I’ve known Jeremy since my first visit to Claremont in 2002, and I wrote about him in Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way. He showed that once you become hyper-aware of what comprises your life and what physical and mental spaces can be created, you are more likely to make personal and professional breakthroughs.
6. Be open and receptive to new information and experience. Besides new initiatives like the Game Lab, there were also presentations on topics that were presumably not on everyone’s radar, such as “Disruption in Children’s Linear TV,” by Emily Arons, a Game Lab mentor and Senior Vice President of International Business at the Pokémon Company International; and “Can Augmented Reality Save the {Shopping} Mall?” by Wanda Gregory, also a Game Lab mentor and Director of the Digital Technology and Culture Program, Seattle University. In Deborah Clark’s afternoon keynote, she emphasized that in order to thrive in the future and to carve out a unique space in business media, Marketplace must continue to evolve beyond being thought of only as a radio show, but also as a continuous source of information via its website and social media, including video content.
7. Face to face networking is essential. Undoubtedly everyone at Drucker Day is involved in some form of online networking. As valuable as that is, there is nothing like an event in which diverse people are brought together with lots of opportunities to meet and interact with each other (aided by food and drink). Drucker was a champion networker, in an era when face to face was the main option.

It’s only fitting to give Peter Drucker the last word. In the “holographic effect” segment, an interviewer observes that a lot of his principles seem like common sense. “All of it is common sense,” Drucker responds. “That’s why it’s so rare.”